Make the Internet faster for Australians

Cloudflare is a service known to provide CDN/DDoS capabilities for websites.

If you are accessing a website that is protected by Cloudflare, you will generally get performance benefits thanks to its CDN technology.

However if you are accessing Cloudflare protected websites as a customer of Telstra or Optus, you will be routed internationally because there is no peering agreement between Telstra or Optus and Cloudflare and consequently the sites will be slow. Example: If you live in Sydney and access a website that is hosted in Sydney, your traffic is routed through Los Angeles and this adds seconds to your browsing session.

For Telstra, Cloudflare say this is due to a "Telstra" tax where Telstra charge a premium for data accessed through peering. Telstra has said that the price figures have been overstated.

In the past this only affected Cloudflare websites that were using the Free plan, but recently they have changed it to affect Pro customers that have to pay USD $20/month. Sure USD $20 a month is affordable, but USD $200 a month is not affordable for many website operators.

Website operators now need to pay USD $200/month in order to get performance benefits for its end users on Telstra and Optus networks.

Cloudflare also say there are other network operators around the world that are expensive (HiNet, Korea Telecom, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica)​

Telstra, Optus and Cloudflare we want you to negotiate in good faith to ensure appropriate peering arrangements are in place so Australians can enjoy fast, safe web browsing. The internet is already slow enough in Australia. ​